As part of our Back to School week, I had planned on playing through Rockstar's Bully and comparing Jimmy's experience at a strict boarding school with my own.
I didn't attend a boarding school, but after graduating high school I worked in one for a year in the UK (if you know what a gap year is, this was mine). I mostly did odd jobs wherever my skillset could best be employed: some sports coaching here, some history and art tutoring there, alongside some general supervision of kids in the boarding house common spaces after school hours. Which all sounds very adult, but I was actually just 17 years old when I started the job. Now that I type that out, it seems kinda fucked up. Maybe I shouldn't have been allowed to do that, especially since I was sometimes legally responsible for the welfare of senior students who were 19. One Italian kid I remember had a beard.
Despite the school I worked at being in England and Bully's Bullworth Academy being set in New England, I figured there were enough similarities between the two--the uniforms, the strict regime, the weird emphasis on violence and sex so many of the cooped-up kids seemed obsessed with--to write a piece on.
But then I actually installed and tried to play the PC's Scholarship Edition of Bully, a game I remember from almost 20 years ago as being pretty good, and Jesus Christ. It's bad.
First up, while the game nominally supported 4K, actually opting for that resolution broke its display, and I had to go into the game's executable options to fix it. Not a great start. It's not the only area we’ve come a long way from since 2006. Bully's camera movement and player movement aren't tracked at the same speed, so moving the camera around behind the player while also moving the character causes you to run in weird directions, unable to move in a straight line for more than a few seconds at a time. It has text prompts that look like they were lifted from Windows 3.1, and the combat--probably the most important aspect of the game other than Jimmy's ability to cover long distances on foot--is dreary.
And man, I don't remember the 2000s being this overtly mean. The entire vibe of the game is just bleak, from the design of the school itself to the way every single character is just hugely draining to listen to and be around. I get that it's a product of its time, and a specific idea within that time, but boy, from 2024 it's a borderline repulsive place.
I am a man in my 40s who normally has no trouble playing and enjoying games from different eras, but there was something about this game's specific rough edges and narrative focus that brought a hard "no" from me almost instantly. It's not that Bully is old. It's just that it's...bad. Bad in so many ways that I decided to look up its original reviews from the time and had my mind blow. Here's IGN:
As has become the standard for Rockstar titles, the characterization and humor in this game is top notch. Bully is easily one of the funniest PlayStation 2 titles we've ever seen and is one of the few pieces of software out there than can legitimately be called a "comedy."
It's wild how low our collective bars were back then for this specific type of experience. So many games and genres can stand the test of time, but Bully, once lauded as a success, now looks and plays like dogshit. And I was playing a remastered version of the game!
So sorry everyone, I am not going to be comprehensively comparing my own boarding school experiences with those found in Bully, because I am not going to be playing all the way through this game when I could be doing literally anything else. Maybe that'll change if Rockstar ever get around to properly remastering--or even remaking--it, but given the fact you can already buy it on PC, warts or not, I'm not going to be holding my breath.
Just so you don't think I'm entirely ducking out from my original pitch, though, what I will say about my boarding school experience from what little I played/remember of Bully is that while there were some similarities between the kids at my school and Bullworth Academy--namely, an extreme obsession with sex and violence (as separate concepts, not both at the same time), the kids I was living with were still...kids? Sure, they'd get in fights a lot, but they were still identifiably kid fights, not the 80's college movie x nature documentary shit that Bully is so obsessed with.
And when you hung out with them or asked them about their future plans or what they'd done on the weekend, they were, once again, just kids. As opposed to everyone in Bully, who exists somewhere on a spectrum between "exhausted stereotype" and "overwrought villain" in the way so many other Rockstar characters did until we were well into the 2010s.
Looking back at Bully, it's hard to recommend almost any of it. If you want to play a 2000's Rockstar experience (I know this was developed by Rockstar Vancouver, not the North team, but it's still got the star on the box), Vice City remains the pinnacle. And if you want to play a game set in a boarding school, where there's loads of fighting and romantic options and lessons to attend and a world to explore outside the classroom, then just...go play Persona 3 instead.
Back to School is a week of stories about changes, nostalgia, and learning new things. It's part of our big goals for 2024; if you like what you see and want to help us get there, please consider subscribing.
